Signal integrity has become a critical issue in the design of high-speed chip-to-chip communications systems. Using the proper termination scheme can be critical to maintaining good signal integrity. Improper terminations can lead to poor quality due to reflections or signal attenuation. On-chip termination can eliminate the need for external termination resistors on the board, thereby avoiding signal reflections caused by stubs between an on-chip buffer and an off-chip termination resistor.
Unfortunately, in high-speed operations, signals can be distorted as a result of non-linearities in the IV (current-voltage) curve of the on-chip termination resistance. In differential I/O signaling, non-linearity can contribute to different edge rates between the pair of signals, which can adversely impact timing and reduce the data valid window. In addition, conventional on-chip termination schemes are susceptible to process, voltage, and temperature (PVT) variations. As a result, the termination resistance levels will typically vary over different PVT conditions.
As a particular technology matures, process variations usually decrease sufficiently to enable acceptable implementation of on-chip termination. However, the resistance of on-chip termination resistors can vary by 10% to 60% across a temperature range of operation of −40 C to +125 C, especially in termination schemes that use transistors as the resistive elements. In addition to their wide variations in resistance with respect to temperature, transistors also have inherent non-linearities in their IV curves. Both of these characteristics make it very difficult to control the accuracy and constancy of on-chip impedances implemented using transistors. To compensate for such wide variations in resistance as a function of temperature, elaborate PVT calibration circuits are typically employed to control the configuration of programmable, on-chip termination schemes used for I/O buffers. These calibration circuits increase the complexity of the I/O buffers and require additional layout area.
Moreover, in certain applications, such as in field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), I/O buffer modes that operate at different power supply voltage levels are frequently deployed on a single chip. Because of the non-linearity of the IV curve of the on-chip impedance, a separate PVT calibration circuit may need to be implemented for each different voltage level and/or each different I/O bank, since the calibration circuit for one voltage level will typically not properly calibrate the on-chip impedance used for a different voltage level. Implementing multiple calibration circuits, each of which may require one or more pads and may need to be placed close to its associated I/O bank, increases die size and reduces the number of pads that can be used as I/O signal pads.